This question may sound silly to some people but i am trying to understand the purpose of a quad core nic. I will give some examples please correct me

Example 1: Host with 3 Virtual Machines. I can assign to VM1 the port 2 of the nic , VM2 the Port 3 of the nic and VM3 the Port 4 of the nic so each VM will use its own dedicated port for load balancing correct? Also Port 1 will be used by the host only

Example2 : Binding them as one? This means if i have a quad port gigabit nic, binding the ports together will run at 4 gigabit speed correct? The thing is if the switch runs at 1 gigabit the transfer rate between them will be set to run as 1 gigabit speed. But if the switch is 10 gigabit switch the speed between them will run at 4 gigabit correct?

Example : 3 If its a file server with multiple users connecting to it and the nic is not set as binding this means different users may use either port1 or port2 or port3 or port 4 automatically for load balancing correct? I guess as long as their map drives are set with the hostname of the server and not the ip.

Please correct me if am wrong or if i said anything stupid __________________Just call me the 1000Questionsguy

You can bind them together to provide load balancing for better throughput. You can configure them for fault tolerance. Say you configure two that way. All traffic uses one. If that one goes down, the 2nd takes over. You have to be careful though. Some applications don't support some of these methods. Skype for Business, for one, doesn't support binding multiple cards together for load balancing. But fault tolerance is fine. You can also have different ports on different networks. Think DMZ.

A quad port NIC gives you flexibility for configuration in space-limited server hardware like a 1U pizza-box type server. It is common to team 2 or more NICs for performance and fault tolerance.VMware recommends to separate VMkernel management, another port for dedicated for vMotion, dedicated pass-through NICs for certain VMs.Also separate large-Ethernet frame SAN traffic from regular network communications traffic. So although you could have one ESX host with just one NIC, you would not want to do it that way for optimum performance, security and reliability.__________________Anthony Maw, B.Sc., MCSE, Vancouver, Canada, Earth, Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy.....Tel/SMS: +1 604-318-9994http://www.anthonymaw.com

Just want to say that this is a very good thread and thanks to all for contributing. Any recommendations on NIC teaming to a quorumdisk in a SAN setting using a four port NIC?__________________Curt Spanburgh

Hi everyone just to add some last info for this topic. This few days i have been studying the topic "NIC Teaming" and how it really works in the background. I must say i learned a lot of things. Not calling my self expert at all but at least now i have an idea when i have a server in front of me either 2012/2012R2 or 2016 how to setup NIC teaming and which modes to choose for better performance or load balancing. Depending on the server of course.

I will post another video that really helped me and I took my notes from that video.

ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGSq_pq95e4

Thanks to the Guy.

My few words the way i learned it

I would choose Switch Independent Mode.It does not offer me the best load balance for incoming traffic but it does offer me redundancy because NICs in the NIC teaming can be connected to different network switches instead of one. If one switch fails there is redundancy from the other switches. Does not require configuration to the network switches.

Switch Dependent Mode does not offer me redundancy since all the NICs in the NIC Teaming need to be connected to the same switch. It does though offers better load balance for the incoming traffic because Switch is aware that NIC belongs to a NIC Teaming and can help by load balance the incoming traffic evenly between the NICs in the NIC Teaming. Requires configuration on the network switch.

Teaming Modes :

Address Hash Hyper-V PortDynamic Mode

Dynamic Mode is a combination of Address hash( For Outbound Traffic) and Hyper-V Port(For Incoming Traffic) If one of the NICs in the NIC Teaming is busy(Outbound Traffic), outbound traffic can be redirected to a different NIC in the NIC Teaming with less traffic. (Flowlets). This mode as i read is able to do that.

By all means! It's not like you would be introducing a multihomed DC by doing that.

Then again, if all PHYs are on the same board and connected to the same switch, there's not so much to gain in terms of redundancy. If you have multiple switches or separate NICs to team, go ahead and do that!__________________Evgenij Smirnov

I was called into a shop and they had a SQL box and an application server setup for CRM on premise . It was not working.

I looked in back of the box and saw two four port NICs in these Dell servers.They were all populated into the switch. eight cables.I looked in the OS and saw that all the ports were set to DHCP. There were eight Dns records for this machine. When I got rid of all of this and used on static IP, I could get everything to work. Then said they had a Network administrator.

So given this, how could this NICs be used to increase through put or redundancy without causing issues with the multiple LDAP calls to resolve the many objects that are stored in the CRM databases. Here is a small example. The GUIDS of the user objects are stored in the System User base table in the CRM Organization of the deployed CRM instance.

I imagine there is a best practice for Share Point deployments as well. Not everything will be going in the cloud so if someone has some suggestions it would be great.__________________Curt Spanburgh

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